Here are five reasons why video should be an option in any digital marketing strategy:
1. It goes hand in hand with social media
To maximise your content strategy, social has to be a part of your promotion. A video gives you something engaging to post and is said to be one of the three most effective social media marketing tactics (Marketing Tech Blog).
However, you must make sure that your video is relevant to each social platform. The immediacy of Twitter means you’ll probably want to keep it short, keeping the longer form on YouTube or Vimeo for those who want more content. If you already have an established audience on a Facebook or Twitter page then make the most of it. Use paid seeding to make it more visible and connect directly with users. By all means embed the video on your website, but the majority of your views will come from a third party site.
2. It helps you to analyse and improve
As with any discipline, the way to figure out your content’s effectiveness is to evaluate. If you create a video and the viewing figures aren’t up to much, then there are tools to help you figure out why. YouTube in particular has some great tools to analyse user engagement with video. You can breakdown the moments of your video in sections by looking at the absolute audience retention. If you have a three minute video and views are dropping off at the second minute, you can ask yourself why, analyse and figure out what you can do to improve.
You can also look at the relative audience retention, which compares your video’s audience retention rate compared to other videos of the same length. Can you structure yours in a similar way to competitors? Tools will improve your future output: make the most of them.
3. It allows you to ‘dress up’ a call to action
The purpose of any good digital content should be to drive action from a user. Video can be an easy way of encouraging this. It generally has set structures that, as long as it’s of an appropriate length and well-made, you can fit your ‘calls to action’ in amongst your content. It’s also passive. Users don’t have to do anything once they’ve pressed play, except sit back and watch. Charity videos are particularly effective at using this technique in inventive ways. They often manage to cram many calls to action in to videos that would often be overwhelming in text form.
4. Users want it…
An aimClear study from 2013 showed that search results with video have a “41% higher click-through rate than plain text.” Once they have clicked through, bounce rate is important. The longer a user stays on-site the more likely you are to rank higher. Now that’s not to say video is the be all and end all, but if we want to create content for a browsing user then video is one that will engage and is more likely to be shared.
5. …And it makes them respect your brand
Internet users realise that video takes a level of effort. Research by Axonn showed that seven out of ten people had their perception of a brand positively altered after seeing interesting video content. It also gives a literal face and voice to your brand. It’s easy to misconstrue a brand’s tone of voice in written media, less so when there’s an actual person speaking.
Adopting video into a marketing strategy is now both affordable and feasible for any business with a modest budget. By carefully planning and analyzing, video can be one of the wisest and effective content marketing tactics to jump on.
